After returning from Birmingham, returning the rental car and resolving some boat maintenance issues (oil change, etc.), we left Columbus Marina at dawn to ensure we would have enough daylight to make it through three locks and 117 miles to Demopolis Yacht Basin. The marinas are few and far between on the Tenn-Tom Waterway - although relatively more plentiful than on the Mississippi River - and because of the cool weather and the relative lack of attractive anchorages, we aimed to be in a marina every night on this stretch.

We had asked for advice on this on the Loopers' online forum, and most of the Loopers that responded, in a rather condescending tone tending to see this voyage to be like camping and couldn't understand why anyone in their right mind would want to spend money in a marina ("money down the drain", blah-blah) or go to a restaurant ("never had a good meal in a restaurant", etc.) when one could anchor and cook over propane on the boat. We'd also heard some horror stories about anchor dragging when logs hit the rode, hapless boaters grounding themselves in allegedly 'deep-enough' bayous and oxbows and anchorages filling up with debris that boaters would have to carefully (and sometimes unsuccessfully) wend their way through it all to avoid propeller damage. Besides which, most of the anchorages we passed seemed either inhospitable (way too narrow, dark and forlorn or next to a RR bridge) or far from any possibility of taking a dinghy to land to walk around or see anything, except trees and mud. So we figured we wouldn't bother to anchor and just seek marinas (with power and water) and explore the towns if accessible, particularly now that the temperatures were dipping into the low 30s. I guess I lied about being the outdoor type.

This Tenn-Tom unfortunately skirts most civilization or urban centers for many miles - not that it is devoid of history, but this stretch of Alabama and Mississippi is not like the historically-dense and extraordinarily interesting Mississippi Delta area (the catch basin of the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers between Memphis and Vicksburg on the other side of Mississippi state) - it is just remote countryside.

So at dawn we passed through the John C Stennis Lock (down 27 feet) just outside the Columbus Marina and made our way the hundred plus mile journey down the winding river. We passed through the Tom Bevill Lock (down 27 feet) that has the 1926 steam-powered paddlewheeler Montgomery on display on the port side before the lock.

Stennis Lock; Bevill Lock Visitor Center with paddlewheeler, and a pair of deer crossing the waterway.

Just before Heflin Lock (down 36 feet), we encountered two deer swimming across the river before we interrupted them and caused them to turn back even though they were nearly at the other side. Poor deer. We continued down the water way another 50 miles and passed the junction with the Black Warrior River, a river that is navigable to Tuscaloosa and as far as 10 miles past Port Birmingham, and turned into the Demopolis Yacht Basin just after the confluence. Or should I say, we turned into the Kingfisher Bay Marina right next door as the DYB is all silted in (you have to talk to someone to figure that out).

Downtown Demopolis

We were tied up surprisingly by 1:30 in the afternoon and decided to take the one-mile walk to the town of Demopolis, founded by exiled French Bonapartists after the fall of Haiti and subsequent expulsion. The town became an important port for the prosperous cotton and timber industries but fell into decline in the early 20th century, and felt somewhat abandoned as we walked through it. The town used to be famous for its entertainment and theatre district into the 1920's and is the birthplace of playwright Lillian Hellman whose family life here was a model for a number of her works including The Little Foxes.

The town is famous for Gaineswood - an large antebellum estate built with cotton money in the mid 1800s. What did not escape our attention here and elsewhere is that the preponderance of the large estates and plantations in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana were actually built by Northerners (many from New York) in the 1840s-1860s. The industrial revolution in textiles, the invention of the cotton gin, the use of slave labor and the fact that the American South supplied 80% of the world's cotton at that time generated enormous fortunes, a fabled gentry and Greek Revival megamansions. So when you think of a proto-typical Scarlett O'Hara - odds are that she was the child of a transplanted New Yorker lawyer or an Irish immigrant that came here to strike it rich in the decades before the War - not so much the child of local pioneer farmers.

Gaineswood